The Green Box compsting facility.
Green Box has diverted about 56,000 pounds of food waste from Madison’s landfills since February.
A new composting service in the Madison area, Green Box Compost, has diverted about 56,000 pounds of food waste from Madison’s landfills since February.
Ben Stanger, the founder and CEO of the company, says he’s been “pleasantly surprised by how well things are going” since operations started this past winter. The business operates out of a facility in Sun Prairie, which contains a 32-foot-long composter and an array of green buckets — the “boxes” given to clients and collected by the company on a weekly basis for commercial clients and biweekly basis for residential clients.
Stanger says Green Box now has about 325 residential and seven commercial clients subscribed to its services, up from 100 residential clients in spring. His goal is to have 500 residential clients by March 2023.
There are several composting services in the Madison area, but Stanger says his company takes composting “to the next level.” Like Green Box, Earth Stew Compost Services and Curbside Composter provide customers with a fresh bucket that is picked up on a regular basis. But Green Box offers Madison’s first in-vessel composting system, which means food scraps are fed into a large, cylindrical composter housed inside a facility. (Earth Stew composts on a local farm and then uses worm composting; customers can elect to have some vermicompost returned to them. Curbside Composter also takes its scraps to compost on an area farm, and the compost stays on the farm.)
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in-vessel composting produces compost in just a few weeks, compared to other methods that take several months. Green Box’s in-vessel system also allows the company to accept pretty much any organic waste, including meat, dairy and bones — products that Earth Stew does not accept and that Curbside Composter can only take small quantities of.
Stanger hopes to start distributing portions of the finished compost back to customers, who can use it as soil. He plans to offer 5-10 pounds of finished compost to customers every three months, which would be included in their membership. Stanger says this process could begin in late winter or early spring of next year.
‘A leader in the industry’
The hospitality group that runs Lucille, Merchant and Amara restaurants found Green Box’s mission compelling, and they started subscribing to the company’s services in May. Tara Goldberg, the executive director of operations for Rule No. One (RNO), says composting was among the group’s sustainability goals, which also include plans to use mostly recyclable or compostable items and LED lighting in their restaurants.
While residential clients receive single green buckets to fill with food waste, commercial clients like RNO get several 25-gallon carts. Stanger and his team collect these carts from RNO’s Madison restaurants weekly. Goldberg says each of Green Box’s restaurants has black bins for trash, blue bins for recycling and green bins for compost to make it simple for staff to recognize where products should go and ensure only the food waste is put in the Green Box carts.
“It’s really important to us to be a leader in the industry,” Goldberg says, “showing everyone that it is achievable and that you can do it.”
Becoming a “climate champion”
In October, Green Box was named a “climate champion” by the Dane County Office of Energy and Climate Change for the company’s efforts to make it easier for people to compost.
The Climate Champions program started in 2020 as a way to “celebrate the climate leadership happening across Dane County” and motivate other organizations to implement sustainability initiatives, says Kathy Kuntz, director of the Dane County Office of Energy and Climate Change.
The program includes 10 categories, including recognition for those who are making buildings more energy efficient, reducing their overall greenhouse gas emissions, or who have employees who use sustainable forms of transportation, such as bikes or public transit. Green Box won in the “catalyst” category for helping other people incorporate sustainable practices into their lives.
“They’re a really good example of a startup business filling a gap,” Kuntz says. “For us, it’s exciting to see entrepreneurs who have a different way to solve this problem and who make it really easy. It needs to be easy for you to do the right thing.”
Stanger says he’s “honored and grateful” Green Box has been named a climate champion, especially after starting this business only 10 months ago.
“I’m hopeful this is a sign of greater buy-in from the community as we move forward.”
